McEvoy's exegesis, while it rightly stresses the implicatural aspects, misses a
distinction. For Grice, implicatures can be:
A) Conversational
B) Non-Conversational
Within (B), he mentions the
B1) Conventional
Actually, Grice's taxonomy goes:
implicature
---- a) conventional
---- b) non-conventional -- b1) conversational
---------------------------------- b2) non-conversational
But we could simplify things. One expression that Grice says carries a
CONVENTIONAL (and thus not a conversational or non-conventional, more
generally) implicature is one used by Judge Lynch, "too":
i. H: You are a [denotatum of an abusive expression].
L: You are a [denotatum of an abusive expression].
H: Go [make love to] yourself.
L: You too.
Grice would write the fourth conversational move in (i) as
"You, too".
But "too", like "therefore", and "but" -- carry colour -- Grice's borrowing
from Frege -- not truth-conditions.
McEvoy exegesis ("Judicial language: its use and misuse") underestimates this
point:
"Lynch is simply reflecting back or mirroring the abuse received, and this
often would mean a stalemate e.g. "You're a liar!" "No, you're a liar". But
here the judge wins. Not because of
the judge's authority - judges can easily come off worst when it descends to
trading insults, and diminish whatever authority they had. But because the
mirroring is here so effective - clearly [Hennigan] is [figuratively -- as
Grice would have it] a "bit of a c---", and the "You too" [go make love to
yourself] is a faux-polite form with which to bat back his 'GFY' in a
controlled way. [Hennigan] looks like a lot of guys where I live also - rolled
into one. .... [This has to do with "the Irish aspect: by their surnames,
Hennigan and Lynch are both of Irish descent, will have learnt to swear before
they could utter gibberish, and will have a long-running set of inter-family
feuds to draw on. The effect of their dialogue is much altered if we change the
wording - "You are a bit of a c yourself"
contrasts with the feeble "No I'm not, you are", and is of course straight
from the Gaelic which crucially skips any denial that the initial abuse is true
(some scholars suggest that it accepts it true by implicature). This form
arose
classically when one Irish person accused another of being drunk and where it
would usually be implausible to say "No, I'm not, you are" and so the retort is
"You're a bit drunk yourself" - this then being extended across the range of
excoriation. By skipping any denial, the retort's real implicature is that it
couldn't give a fig for the accusation. The judge's SECOND retort "You too" is
the Irish form for batting back any insult, having such a place in the
national
psyche 'twas adopted as their moniker by Ireland's most famous rock band
(aside
The Beatles: Lennon, McCartney, Starkey and Harrison being of course in the
same lineage as Hennigan and Lynch - though the orthodoxy that The Beatles are
in effect an Irish band took a recent battering when Lewisohn showed that to a
shocking extent they were Prods. This kind of digression also being Irish
stock-in-trade)."
But if we go back to THE GUARDIAN, we see that 'too' is only used by Lynch in
"You [go make love to yourself], too". In her first conversational move in the
quatruplet cited by McEvoy she did not:
"And Judge Lynch replied: "You are a bit of a" [denotatum of an abusive
expression] yourself.""
It has to be granted that McEvoy is right in mentioning a possible denial ("No,
I'm not -- YOU are"). And that's why McEvoy suggests, if I understand his
implicatural analysis alright, that Lynch is IMPLICATING a denial, rather than,
say, granting the obscene words by Mr. H. --.
Grice distinguishes between use and mention, and irony has been understood as
"echoic mention", so one has to be careful here. Surely Lynch is being PROVOKED
by Mr. H's obscene choice of a noun (It would have carried possibly the same
implicatures had he said, "You're a berk", but the implicature would have not
gone 'short-circuit' but via the famous fox-based festivities at Berkeley -- or
Berkshire, as I prefer --). In any case, Lynch's first converstational move is
clearly NOT:
i. You are a [denotatum of an abusive noun], too.
But the simpler,
ii. You are a [denotatum of an abusive noun].
-- from which McEvoy infers (or implies, as Geary prefers) that Lynch
IMPLICATES a denial (or not). By using "too" in "You [go make love to
yourself], too", on the other hand, it may be argued that, by logical
implication, she is accepting that she is going to make love to herself. But
since "too" carries NOT a logical implication, but a mere conventional
implicature (that does not deal with truth-values -- cfr. "She was poor, BUT
she was honest", to use Grice's example from a Great-War ditty his father
taught him -- Grice was 2 years old when the Great War started --) questions of
truth (or the 'taming of the true') do not apply either, and so, Lynch is NOT
'stating' or committing herself by way of logical implication that she is going
to go to make love to herself (how can she?) but merely giving a tat for a tit,
as it were -- a common feature, McEvoy seems to be implicating of one of the
many misuses of judicial language.
Or something like that.
Cheers,
Speranza
REFERENCES:
Grice on "too" in "Studies in the Way of Words" -- under 'conventional
implicature' along with "but" and "therefore".
Frege, "Thought", Mind -- on the 'colour' of "but".
